Dreamt dreams

FOREWORD

Dreams come but I don’t know why or how or where from – so is it perhaps rather presumptuous to say I am the author – they come to me, I experience them and write them down, no more an author than an anonymous monk in a scriptorium.

On the other hand, nobody else has had a hand in producing them – unless you can count an occasional audio backdrop from Anette – so it would be perverse to say I am not the author.

This apparent paradox (as with so many others) exists only in the domain of unclear definitions. Ask if ‘I’ is exclusively my conscious waking self, or if it includes the sub-conscious, the dream factory and the whole packet – and the paradox dissolves into thin air.

Dreams are not just shy and elusive, they are positively secretive. As soon as I am awake it is not just the dream that fades – all my memories of it are (systematically?) extracted and erased – an unremembering. Dreaming is a 3D virtual reality with Technicolor, widescreen and Dolby audio, involving the totality of my sensory apparatus. After breakfast I can barely recall a single image.

So how have I remembered these dreams? I have developed – or rather just found – a method. There is an intermediary state of consciousness where I am emerging from my dream, but have not yet broken the surface. If I am woken by an alarm clock, or in any way where I feel that I am pushed for time and need to get going, I pass through this state more or less instantaneously. In a gradual process I find myself naturally poised here for a certain length of time. Obviously I cannot know how long that is, but it is long enough for me to repeat the dream – in words and sentences – to myself. This résumé is what lingers in my memory when I finally break the surface, and it is what I put to paper, but the words drag with them images (stills?) from my dreams.

I have not – not here, publicly, nor for myself privately – attempted to interpret or analyze my dreams. Bob Dylan says (in Gates of Eden)

At dawn my lover comes to me

And tells me of her dreams

With no attempts to shovel the glimpse

Into the ditch of what each one means

and I tend to agree – analyzing and understanding are balm for my intellect, but that is not what dreams are about. However, feel free, if you are that way inclined, but be warned. Anyone can see tattered remnants of my time as a teacher, but no-one, I think, can see that I actually got a kick out of teaching.

01 almost dead

I was reading in the paper (perhaps I actually did see the article in real life?) of a man who was seen to by a doctor. Kidney failure, the doctor couldn't or at least didn't do anything. While I was reading I realized that the patient was someone I was acquainted with, and that I had actually been present at the incident the newspaper was writing about.

I am standing by his bed – they have flashbacks in dreams? - and he is rolling about and having a bad time altogether – cold sweat, groans etc. He rolls out of the bed and lies quite still on the floor. I look down at him and think I ought to do something, so I heave him up on to the bed again – there were some others who rang for a doctor – or, as it turned out, a nurse. I hold his hand, and can clearly feel his pulse, there are two strong beats in my hand. And then there is only one. He's dead, I say, and the others come in and feel his neck to see if there is a pulse. No. Dead. They go out into the kitchen and begin making arrangements for the funeral. I stay with the bloke – and all of a sudden he begins to cough and wave his arms about. I go out into the corridor and, with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, say – you can cancel the funeral.

Just then the nurse – or perhaps it was a doctor – arrives, in a white nurse's (or doctor's) coat and not very much else. Treating the patient consists mostly of her sitting in a close embrace with him astride a large motorcycle which is in the centre of the room. It includes deep kisses, and I am wondering whether this is what he is looking for in the present situation, but he seems to be getting along fine. I leave, and as usual I spend a long time finding the way out of the labyrinthine office tower and back to school – or perhaps it was the other way round.

October 2012

02 Achilles and Agamemnon

Sometimes I know I have only caught the tag-end of a dream – and that the really important part is the bit I have forgotten. As with this one. The dream began (like ‘Nearly dead’) with a man narrowly avoiding death – or coming back from it perhaps. Similar to Nearly Dead but a different dream,